David Osler is a British author, journalist and blogger. His articles have been published in a number of publications including The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman and more.
He has written of diverse topics from finance to politics, music and more. Osler worked for 19 years at ‘Lloyd’s List’ in the UK writing about all aspects of the shipping industry shipping including energy, commodities, and world trade. In 1999, 2010 and 2014 he was voted transport news journalist of the year.
Dave Osler was twice longlisted for the Orwell Prize, Britain’s top honor for political writing. David Osler has made many TV and radio appearances in the UK and outside the UK.
David Osler studied at the Wellingborough Grammar School, the City of London Polytechnic and the London School of Economics. Osler has been finance editor of Lloyd’s List, the world’s oldest English-language daily newspaper and previously worked as news editor for Tribune, the Labour weekly, and for the Labour Research Department.
Osler wrote a blog that was characterized by the Conservative blogger Iain Dale as “brilliantly written and extremely insightful”.
Politics in Great Britain
Prior to the mid 19th century the main parties in the UK were the Tories and the Whigs. By the mid-1800’s, the political landscape was made up of those two political parties made up of the Conservative Party (the former Tories) and the Liberal Party (the former Whigs). The Liberals evolved into the Labour Party in the 1920’s. But it is much more complicated because there are many more parties in the United Kingdom unlike in the United States where politics is mostly dominated by just two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
But even in the U.S. there are certainly sub-groups within the two party system. On the Democrat side there is the liberal wing of the Democratic Party as well as a more so-called ‘moderate’ wing of the Democratic Party. The traditional left of center Democrats in the US would be mostly those who favor the social safety net New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt including Social Security and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with national health insurance for seniors called Medicare while the moderate Democrats occupy the more business friendly wing of the Democratic Party best represented by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The late writer Christopher Hichtens described Bill Clinton as a triangulater, suggesting essentially that he told the left what they wanted to hear, while promoting policies friendly to corporatist Democrats and Republicans such as NAFTA and the repeal of the Glass Steagall banking system protections put in place after the Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression.
On the Republican side there has been a widening post-Trump split between more traditional Republicans (such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney) and far-right Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and others who now remain aligned with the recently ousted Donald Trump. The Trump wing is now a significant part, maybe even the dominant part, of the Republican Party. Most Trump supporters still believe the thoroughly discredited lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The Trump crowd is at least partly made up of various right wing factions such as neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups, many of which attacked the US Capital on January 6th 2021.
There seems to a rise in right-wing extremism and nationalism throughout the Western World in recent years.